Monday, November 3, 2014

Vintage Block Returns as New Quilt!

Before I forget, if you're looking for me these days I'm over on Instagram as mrssquash more often than here (obviously). I'm actually enjoying the beauty of snapping a photo and instantly posting it. Never did I ever think that the "instant" way of doing things would be for me, but for some reason this just clicks. Don't hesitate to give it a try!

A while back I mentioned that a dear friend shared some vintage fan blocks with me. I immediately fell in love with them and wanted to give them a new life as soon as possible. Most were hand stitched and most were already made into blocks, but some were not. So, I decided to give them a good wash and make new setting blocks for all of them. This was not a task without issue, but I love the result!

Here is the finished top - so far. I still need to figure out a backing and binding. I have no idea when the original fans were made - could have been 40's, 50's or even as recents as the 70's. It seems some of the prints are older than others, but they all play together so well!

As I mentioned above, this project was not without a few "issues". Here you can see that two centers are quite a bit off. I had to do a lot of trimming to get them all approximately the same size, and I knew here and there I would face something like this. Since this was the most obvious miss match, I'm really not worried about the quilt police coming after me.

This section fits much better as does the remainder of the quilt. I'm trying to decide whether to bind it using a new print or solid. Any suggestions are most welcome!

Autumn never disappoints in our neck of the woods. This year our fairly new maples in the backyard are not playing well together. The one on the right is taking it's sweet time changing colors. We don't mind as we just get more color later than usual!

The grape arbor is always so pretty just before the leaves begin to fall.

Yesterday Mr. Squash had his annual Polish Leaf Picking Festival. If you click on the photo you can see the leaves in the street ready to be picked up by the city. He'll start all over again when the dogwoods are finished shedding their gorgeous red leaves.

33 comments:

I love seeing you on Instagram and thanks to you I'm hooked on it too. It's such fun and I can also post to Facebook at the same time, which makes it even better. Love your vintage quilt - I'd use a solid I think for the binding. Your yard is just as beautiful in the fall as in the summer. Hugs!!

I have been working on a series of wedge quilts and I love yours. My 80 yr old Dad and I just rolled past your neck of the woods, we've completed day 1 of a road trip to get him to Casa Grande, AZ. Love all the colors in nature right now

I feel really stupid asking this but is Instagram a phone thing? Call me old fashioned but I only use my cell phone for emergencies. Thankfully, we haven't had any emergencies lately and I can't remember the last time I used it.

Love, love , love your Grandmother's Fan quilt. There is a 1930's feedsack backing fabric available. I've used it on two of my feedsack fabric quilts. I have to agree with Stephanie...polka dots would look awesome as a binding fabric, especially red with whit e dots!

Fall looks lovely there IT's starting to get chilly here, just enough for a sweater but it's a nice change. I know what you mean about instagram. So easy. I still love blogs and the longer story but it's getting harder to spend time there. Glad to follow along more regularly!

Beautiful work Candace, well done for ironing out the worst of the issues. Beautiful tree colours. I too am wondering about continuing in Blogland. I haven't made the leap into Instagram though. I am such a luddite! Maybe the odd photo here and there is more sensible for me while I have such little time?